Open House 9780702254918, 9780702253522

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Open House

David Brooks spent his earliest years in Greece and Yugoslavia, where his father was an Australian immigration officer. He studied at the Australian National University before completing postgraduate degrees at the University of Toronto, where he was overseas editor for New Poetry and worked with such poets as Galway Kinnell, Mark Strand, and Czesław Miłosz. Author of four previous collections of poetry, three of short fiction, four highly acclaimed novels, and a major work of Australian literary history (The Sons of Clovis, UQP 2011), his The Book of Sei (1985) was heralded as the most impressive debut in Australian short fiction since Peter Carey’s, and his second novel, The Fern Tattoo (UQP 2007), was short-listed for the Miles Franklin award. The Sydney Morning Herald called his previous collection of poetry, The Balcony (UQP 2008), ‘an electric performance’. Until 2013 he taught Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, where he was also the foundation director of the graduate writing program. Also a renowned editor (of A.D. Hope, R.F. Brissenden) and translator, he is currently co-editor of Southerly, lives in the Blue Mountains of New South Wales, and spends a small portion of each year in a village on the coast of Slovenia.

Also by David Brooks Novels The House of Balthus The Fern Tattoo The Umbrella Club The Conversation Short Fiction The Book of Sei and Other Stories Sheep and the Diva Black Sea Poetry The Cold Front Walking to Point Clear Urban Elegies The Balcony Non-fiction The Necessary Jungle: Literature and excess De/scription: A Balthus notebook The Sons of Clovis: Ern Malley, Adoré Floupette, and a secret history of Australian poetry Translation The Golden Boat: Selected poems of Srečko Kosovel (with Bert Pribac)

David Brooks Open House

First published 2015 by University of Queensland Press PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia uqp.com.au [email protected] © David Brooks 2015 This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher. Cover design/illustration by Sandy Cull, gogoGingko Typeset in 11.5/14 Adobe Garamond by Post Pre-press Group, Brisbane Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group, Melbourne

This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body. Cataloguing-in-Publication Data National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-publication data is available at http://catalogue.nla.gov.au ISBN 978 0 7022 5352 2 (pbk) ISBN 978 0 7022 5491 8 (pdf) ISBN 978 0 7022 5492 5 (epub) ISBN 978 0 7022 5493 2 (kindle) University of Queensland Press uses papers that are natural, renewable and recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The logging and manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin.

to J.S. Harry

Contents A Place on Earth A Place on Earth  3 The Thick of It  5 Poem  6 Rats, Lice and History  7 Looking for a Friend in the Mountains and Not Finding Her  10 No Poem for Weeks Now  11 Dust  12 Hades  14 Tinnitus  15 At the University  16 Her Feet  17 The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto  18 Crows  19 Vivaldi: Concerto for Cello, Strings and Basso Continuo  20 Winter Longing Poem  22 The Ten Towns Down  23 Night Rain  24 Croesus  25

September September  29 Eagles  30 Wasps  31 Nona  32 Carmen 192  34 On First Hearing of a Friend’s Illness  35

Swallows  36 Priest  37 Pumpkins on the Koper Road  38 August  40 Ljubljana in the Sun  41 The Landing  42 The River  44 The Swan  45 Olives  47 Pears  48 A Month of Seven Funerals  50 Late Music  51 Apricots  52 Witness  54

Open House In the Kingdom of Shadows  57 Spiders About the House  58 Eight Mile  60 A Call from Mandelstam  61 Indian Mynahs  63 Looking for Andrei Gromyko  65 Phasmid  68 Ninox strenua  70 Open House  71 The Barbarians  72 Freight  74 Cold Mountain  75 The Plover  76 Jennifer’s Mound  78 Carmen 193  80

The Roo Field  81 ‘We pass a town empty of people’  83 Captain Hunter and the Petrels  84 Majesty  86 How to Ride a Horse  88 At the Lytton Hotel  90 Plenitude  92 The Gate  97 Wild Ducks  98

Report from Blue Mountains Another Page from the Book of Everything  103 Beauty and the Beast  105 Mist  106 If Anyone Asks for Me  108 The Man in the Lift  109 Broad Bean Meditation  110 Report from Blue Mountains  112 Lamplight  113 ‘Windmill’  114 The Motherboard  116 Midsummer  118 Money Like Water  119 At Refuge  121 Morning, Station Street  122 Silent Night  123 White Cockatoos  125 Cock-crow  130 Black Dog  131 Night Waking  132 Who I Am  133

Reading to the Sheep Ark  137 Hidden Valley  138 Accomplishment  139 Ram in the Rain  140 Mort Street  141 Reading to the Sheep  142 Mountain Night  144 Orpheus  145 Birthday Poem  146 Humans at the Gate  147 The Ornamental Cherry  148 Driving Home  149 Afterthought  150 The Lambs  151 Autumn Twilight  153 Mushroom Season  154 Each Other’s Tongue  155 Notes  156 Acknowledgments  157

A Place on Earth

A Place on Earth A young boy is sitting by a fire on the edge of the desert. There’s a car through the scrub behind him pulled off to the side of the long dirt road and a tent close by with his father in it, sleeping already. It is late evening, nine or ten, and he’s long ago eaten: toast, baked beans on a tin plate, burnt potatoes, tea. 1964 perhaps, or ’63: it doesn’t matter what year. He is sitting by the fire, stoked earlier so that now it’s burned back to the ancient fire-gutted log he found and dragged there before the sun set – burned back so that, now the log is deep alight, he can see a world in it: sees falling towers, forgotten Alexandrias and Babylons, the night markets of Wúzhōu, Rangoon, Hong Kong, sees Siegfried and the Götterdämmerung, sees a huge, blood-orange sun setting over the burnt, black hills around him, autos-da-fé, charred ruins, faces staring from the flame so beautiful they seem to scorch him, sees the bombing and the burning of Dresden, bodies in fiery graves, wild midnight carnevales, sees 3

Moon-men and Sun-men in corroboree, sees hearth-fires and bonfires and beacon-fires, Etnas in their scoriac flows, townspeople and villagers fleeing, docks and homes and factories alight, sees battered galleons, masts collapsing, armadas blazing on the sea, radiant sunrise breaking from the glowing embers as if out of a phoenix nest. Something rustles in the ti-tree, a wallaby perhaps, night bird or wild dog drawn by the fire, and he looks up from his dreaming, sees the huge darkness of the night and the vast canopy of unknown, unnameable stars, a night so infinite, this night, it will never leave him. Time and again he will look up – for sixty or for seventy years, luck holding – and it will always be there: before him the fire, behind him his father sleeping, that something rustling in the undergrowth, and about him the galaxies turning, the still point of his being, a place on earth, gift beyond measure.

4

The Thick of It I was standing there, washing up and thinking about Baudelaire, how one might give one’s soul to be able to write so well but then the dog came down to lap at his water-bowl and sleep on the armchair and on some obscure impulse I went out into the night air, for the thick of it, the hum of life everywhere – looked at the stars, the insects swarming about the back-door lamp, and coming in, stepped over first a cockroach then a slug, leading its small family somewhere. How can we be so arrogant, to think that our souls are worth so much?

5

Poem Since I have come upstairs on all fours to greet him, the dog, for such is his wont, licks first the top of my head and then my left ear, just as, if he can catch me, he’ll lick any cracked or wounded skin as I get up in the morning – it’s nothing that I can’t wash off and probably helps heal some other, more ancient hurt, or balms it. It is a warm spring day. The smell of each of us rises gently into the ether, yours of lemons and woodsmoke, summer flowers, his of grass and dust and beloved blanket, mine – for such is my own ancient wont –  of you.

6

Rats, Lice and History i This morning, making coffee, I watched through the kitchen window an old crow settle on a low branch of a Blue Mountains Ash and, looking out over the valley, for no apparent reason, burst into raucous song, and I thought – I don’t know why – of that other late summer, so long ago, when, full of my mother’s death I set out with five hundred newearned dollars and a haversack heavy with volumes of Jack Kerouac and took flight for the northern winter, to visit school friends of two years before – landing in San Francisco, heading for Sacramento to see the best of them, my namesake, then betraying him, only five days later, when, at her invitation, I went to visit his girlfriend, two hundred miles south and left sex-sore and sleepless the next morning by Greyhound for Iowa and the parents of the first girl I had ever made love with, whose doctor-father (she was at school elsewhere) regaled me all evening with Rats, Lice and History before (in such perfect irony) I woke itchy and sore in his attic guest-bed with newhatched Australian crab-lice of my own and, confessing, was shown the door with stony silence and a prescription for DDT, his own attempt, I think, to kill me, though I went on, still 7

burning, physically, to see and be rebuffed by his daughter in Milwaukee and so hastened home to my oncehost-family in Chicago, for three days of rest before heading for Rochester and the photographs of Weston and Cameron and Minor White and a once-dreamt-of night with Miss Teenage Chicago of four years before, who sent me, then, to stay with her cousin in Baltimore who, undeterred by the thought of her heart-surgeon husband, would wake me each morning with languid strokings on the floor – even her name now lost in the subsequent embarrassment of my telephone call from a clinic, in St John, Newfoundland, run by sadists of some Christian order who had burned and scalded and punctured me, to tell her of what was almost certainly (but wasn’t) a cousin-to-cousin STD, and then – my true goal all along – after another five days’ travelling, to S., in Michigan, ten years older than I, who had once, in Sydney, held me so long and so gently, seeing something I had not yet seen in me, and we made love at last, fumbling and sad, in the bleak snow-light, while her army husband was out, and she came, and sobbed, and since no-one had ever come with me before, I thought I had hurt or broken her. ‘It’s alright,’ she said, ‘It’s alright,’ but it never was, not for another thirty years yet, not 8

until you and I met, and the wheel left me, here, in this openness, on a morning like this one, trying like that old crow to sing it out, let it all go, the pain and the confusion and the embarrassment of it, the regrets and the damage and the stubborn, untrackable grieving, into this sudden light.

9

Looking for a Friend in the Mountains and Not Finding Her parsley shooting already, coriander almost gone to seed, grass lank and riddled with dandelion, bean plants to the knees, lemon in blossom, banksia like a daylight lantern, off to the north the low, blue mountains stretching for a thousand miles

10

No Poem for Weeks Now No poem for weeks now, I don’t know why – the flood of things – then suddenly, tonight, just after 1 a.m., from the other end of the house, you singing under your breath, so quietly that, through the rain, the sound of the heater, trucks on the highway changing gear, I can barely hear but do and close my eyes, breathe outward, slowly, a breath it seems I have held for years.

11

Dust When I came back after almost a month away a wild wind had damaged the roofs of neighbouring houses and brought down the cherry laurel in our yard and there was a fine layer of dust over everything: dust in the cupboards, dust in the drawers, dust beneath the dried, cut roses, dust in the cups and glasses, dust in shoes, the dust of our neighbours, the dust of the city, the dust of last year’s harvest, dust of the Simpson Desert two thousand kilometres west. What’s there to say? Sometimes, as I talk, I feel the dust creeping through my sentences, thoughts turning to fine powder as they wend through the motes of it: theories, philosophies, histories. Our dreams are dust, our loves are dust, the things we fight for are dust. In the Taj Mahal they are sweeping the dust: in the Pentagon, the Vatican, the Louvre. In Padna 12

Emiliano is ploughing the dust; in Hay the sheep are straggling through dust; in Canberra the Prime Minister is coughing because of the dust; outside the wind and the birds are crying because of their burden of dust: crying or singing, I don’t know (the world flows through our sentences, sometimes it sings). In the evening, the dust turns red in the sunset: there are worlds up there, and centuries, great palaces, great temples, great archives of dust. The past is dust. The future is dust coating the tips of our fingers, gathering under the dry, cut roses burning as the world turns away from us angry beyond measure.

13

Hades Nearly a decade since we’ve spoken but still sometimes you come again, last night in a dream, that after dinner I go out to the office, though I know you know it isn’t that, and when I come back it seems it’s to an empty house. I walk through, calling your name, but there’s only a message on a mobile phone, soft and intimate as if you’re speaking to a lover. At last you appear – you’ve been sleeping, you say – and explain how wrong I am about the message. But there’s so much that isn’t said. It’s cold outside, almost winter, the kind of cold that must have forced Persephone underground, to a warmth I’ve only just now realised Hades must have had.

14

Tinnitus The cicadas have entered my head, I don’t know why, growing louder through the day, worst when sleep is bad, their shrill silver ristling filling every moment, the heat and the hills they bring mocking every comment, ironising everything I think or do. Always here, always also away, it is as if I were perpetually two, as if anything you’d say you must say also to the trees, the heat, the metal sky. Pulsing with the blood’s pulse, holding the heart firm, they tell me that there is no stopping them, that they are going to be with me ’til I die.

15

At the University The university and the smell of ancient error coming even from the trees, the rictus in these laughing faces, young gazelles to the slaughter. All this unconscious machinery of death. Five hundred thousand years to stand an inch or two taller, grow fatter, live forty years longer but for what? To feel the same jealousies, the same ancient lusts? eating our way mindless through all the creatures of the earth as if we were not one of them or the ability to talk, remember, flush our scat brought us somehow closer to a supreme being who, if ever it existed as anything other than part of our perverse mathematics of sublimation and denial would turn, and shudder at the thought of us.

16

Her Feet I take a photograph of her feet and want to write about them, must, so delicate they appear in the dove-grey light, as if a detail from a lost Vermeer four centuries ago. And, yes, I know about the fetish, the not-seeing-her-whole; it’s just that when I look at them I think of all the places they have carried her and how they have brought her at last here and to me. Placed there, in the shadow under the chair, it is as if they are listening to a distant music, or remembering, as they make me do, the smell of old stone or long summer grass, at dusk, above a house we are returning to, a home somewhere.

17

The Assassination of Benazir Bhutto Taking a leaf from Salman Rushdie the military government of Pakistan has resorted to magic realism, asking us to believe that the late and, at the time, doubtless soon-to-be-elected leader of their opposition, Benazir Bhutto, was not assassinated at a political rally but in fact killed herself by striking her head sharply on the corner of her vehicle’s sun roof while ducking an imaginary bullet. Sooner believe that blood from her several imaginary exit wounds left the Rawalpindi General Hospital, entered the crowded streets, found its way to the dusty highway and, weaving through the feet of goats and camels, elephants and roadside chapati vendors and avoiding the tyres of military convoys, made its way to Islamabad where, climbing the steps of the presidential palace and crossing the carpeted halls it pooled at last at the feet of General X, who for weeks now has not been able to pick up a waterglass, sign an official document, or touch the cheek of his beloved granddaughter without leaving a stain.

18

Crows I wake, late at night, it must be 4 a.m., and the words are back, demanding attention like a murder of unwelcome crows shaken loose by a dream, a young boy broken into the house, the wild kid from down the road. At last I corner him and lock him in the bathroom while we try to decide what to do with him. I should call the police, I know, but know I won’t, this angry boy with the mad drunken mother and that car-thief friend who treats him like a brother, which he may well be, both trying to steal what she can’t give. Nothing about a dream, they say, that isn’t in the self somehow: crows, wild boy, car-thief, mum.

19

Vivaldi: Concerto for Cello, Strings and Basso Continuo Morning, with sunshine and young lovers, in Anna’s parents’ holiday house at Tambour on the far South Coast, nineteenseventy-one I think, her father reading the Canberra Times and her mother talking while she, big-eyed, big-jawed and pencil-thin, sitting on Luke’s lap and quietly finishing her baked-beans-on-toast, winks impishly at me as I enter the room, grins, while Luke, long-blond-haired and beaming, signals unambiguously from behind, and I can’t feel anything but companion pleasure, my own girlfriend still sleeping on the mattress in the shed, the day about to spread, like the two to come, in a languid atmosphere of ganja and the Grateful Dead – all music it was then, all music, all a wild and mischievous innocence caught on the wide, full lips of time before the jungle of future come: a year later and a marriage, three months before their child Daniel was born; Anna and I lying briefly and broken on a floor somewhere, Luke gone for the seventh time in his beloved panel van, foot planted firmly to the floor, guitar

20

and surfboard in the back, doubleshuffling through the tight Clyde Mountain curves. Twenty years later, it must have been, she came to visit, matronly, a country lawyer, Daniel now twenty-one, just finishing his degree, my then wife-to-be not wanting to know about such parts of me, Luke’s name on a poster on the Parramatta Road: was he still playing James Taylor, Jackson Browne? – and is he now, another twenty years on, still doing so, as if no time has ever really gone? Anna a senior partner in a legal firm, Daniel running for state parliament … What are these taut and wild confusions, this shimmering light, these exquisite tensions of quavers, these tumbling and golden constellations if they are not memory?

21

Winter Longing Poem Though I leave all the doors and windows open, my longing for you will not leave this house.

22

The Ten Towns Down Those sounds again, each night, over and over as the dark unfolds, great punchings and shudderings of air, as if squadrons of dragons were taking flight, such screechings and clangings as might attest the closing of the seven gates of Hell, thunderings, like the stampede of a thousand wildebeest or moanings, like the lonely calvings of a glacier – but no, it’s only the coal train from Lithgow as it crests the range, begins the slow descent towards Sydney, hauls its thousand tonnes of cold black fire through Katoomba, Leura, Wentworth Falls and our dreams with them, all the ten towns down.

23

Night Rain Night rain washing the mountains again reminding us all of the sea we can’t have, just like the sea does, just like the sea.

24

Croesus With delicate fingers and long silvery nails – Arthur Rimbaudii Sometimes, late at night, as I sit at the desk by the window, she comes to stand behind me, rests my shaven head against her and, as we talk, inspects the pores of my scalp for the grime of the day, squeezing them between the nails of her thumb and forefinger, wiping whatever she finds away. We fall silent. Minutes pass, and minutes. She is finding things where they don’t exist. The night deepens, stars reappear. I am Croesus amongst his millions, each small, sharp pain a diamond, a needle of unimagined light.

25

September

September Straight from the flight it’s as if my sight is hypersensitised, flooded by the thick late-summer light, the figs gravid on the boughs, grapes almost over-ready, the lavender alive with bees. In the dark kitchen, a small mountain of fresh-picked tomatoes glows in a wicker basket, and Nona, telling me about the season, runs her fingers through a bowl of just-husked beans to show me how fat they are, each one a living gemstone, agate veined with purple. There’s frozen spinach too, Maria says, we have to eat to make way for the rest, and an abundance of pale green peppers ready for roasting. Eight hours later, in bed at last, your breasts and belly are firm fruit in my hands, your back, your neck, your shoulders taste of sun.

29

Eagles Gliding in from Korte, riding the thermals along the northern ridge one a half-kilometre behind the other, going home, dwindling into the distance in such taut synchrony; ten minutes or more I’ve watched them and scarcely a movement of their wings, looking down a thousand feet into the heart of things.

30

Wasps I have been getting used to them, the wasps, here each morning over any fruit left out telling me which peach is sweetest, which apple to cut, chasing me from stove or reading chair, exploring the old stone walls for cavity, clearing great spaces for themselves in air. Now one has bitten my cheek and the sting’s infected, the venom’s been working through me all week. Tant pis. It’s only fitting. I’ve killed a hundred in my time, at least.

31

Nona iii Nona begins things, a kind of midwife to the day, up always by 5.40, leaving her room at 6 a.m., just as the bells start at St Blaza’s, to let the dog and the cat out, make the tea, cut sandwiches, slice the bread and cheese. By the time I’m up, two hours later, she’s made the minestra, picked salad greens, fed hens, aired rooms, done more than a dozen other things and is sitting almost motionless by the heater at the southern window, in her daily grey, thinking of God-knows-what, perhaps olives, perhaps the garden, perhaps her husband, dead these forty years, perhaps her son, now sixty, out in the olive groves somewhere, the winter light on his shoulders, the wind tugging at his thinning hair. Like him she likes chocolate, different cheeses, can tell one grade of fresh-pressed oil from another at more than a dozen paces, though unlike him sleeps poorly. Her back 32

and her hips, she says, are slowly killing her. When she goes it will be with all due ceremony, another part of the village will flap untended in the Boria, another house lose its hold.

33

Carmen 192 Your mother, in her incomprehensible denial, has let that fingering, manipulative priest sleep in our bed. You’re right: it’s time to drag it out into a field somewhere and burn it.

34

On First Hearing of a Friend’s Illness I.M. Noel Rowe

This morning climbing the stairs I heard a rooster crowing an early noon and somebody tuning a radio somewhere, moving from station to station, the shrill sound of the swallows darting about the telephone wires, then someone shunting bricks, Emiliano driving up on his tractor, Franz starting his old car and turning it off again, going back inside – all this in just a few seconds before nothing, only the sound of waiting, if that has any sound at all.

35

Swallows 4 p.m., the hour of the hundred swallows, skimming the sky-coloured pool. How hard to write the simplest things, these sabre-sharp wings severing words from their stems.

36

Priest Early in the 1990s, that pederast priest lost part of what you might have called a heart to a thirteen-year-old girl now safely married and gone. Almost twenty-one years on, he still slurs his masses under the mountain, tries to drown what is left of whatever it was under a tide of schnapps as if it were a malicious machine or angry cat. Inconscient, the once-thirteen-year-old’s mother still does his laundry. An old man in carpet slippers sometimes tries his lock. The tide is up to his neck.

37

Pumpkins on the Koper Road Almost always there is something flickering on the edge of our attention, like someone at the back of a crowd, trying to catch our eye. Sometimes it delivers its message, sometimes it doesn’t.        This last three months or so there has been a long row of pumpkins in a farmer’s field, running parallel to the highway just on the edge of town, almost exactly where the back-up from the first traffic light draws you to a stop and holds you for a minute or two before the next green ushers you further down.            At first it was nothing more than a set of pale-orange glimpses amongst the large, dark leaves against a phalanx of ripening corn, but each time I’ve passed they’ve been larger, for so long now that at some point three or four weeks ago I found myself marvelling at their size and, since then, as we’ve driven by, haven’t been able to take my eyes away.              He must, I thought, be growing them for the local show or aiming for some personal best, or to out-grow some neighbour. But no. After a few enquiries I’ve learned that the farmer is seven weeks dead, and there is just no son or daughter to pick them. 38

Earlier this summer, walking through a different field I came across a pumpkin of just that kind. From the front it seemed quite normal, large and ripe and beautiful, but when I walked around I found a wide, black hole where some creature had broken in and emptied it, and, bending down, caught, I thought, the strong, sharp smell of rat. The old man’s funeral was two months ago. The corn is yellowing now, and the great orange globes have probably long stopped growing. Whether some creature has hollowed them I’d have to trespass to know. The mystical significance of pumpkins quite escapes me. But maybe that’s the point: that it’s one of the businesses of things to go, one of the businesses of poets to try to hold them.

39

August No wind, and yet a flock of tiny sparrows drifting to the road like leaves.

40

Ljubljana in the Sun Like a young woman sexually abused by her grandfather, whose brothers care for little else but money, whose father, the hunter, has been running guns to neighbouring countries and whose murderer great uncle, hiding out for fifty years in South America, has now sent his children home to take over the family business, and who, with her soft hands and wide, almost-innocent eyes, has just decided that she might well have – and she may not be wrong –  the most beautiful legs in all of Europe, Ljubljana lies basking in the sun.

41

The Landing Day after golden day, thrall to dust motes and the spars of light, a young boy treks in the sand hills of the stars, wanders through forests in the ancient steps, slips through the trunks of their grain, listening for the lumbering of beasts in the undergrowth, the cries of natives, the macaws there, breathing the rich, moist odours of vegetation and of earth; and should his mother call from two flights above into the echoing cavern of the stair, he can look up and her face will be there, a fellow adventurer, companion in perpetuum. Now and again some neighbour will come heavy with shopping from the street, or jug of glistening water from the courtyard well and speak to him, as if in payment to a troll, but mostly he is alone, in the warm dust and the tiered air, the old stone breathing about him, and the brooding silence, such palaces, such kingdoms there. And if someday, decades away, an ageing, foreignseeming man should come, through the grace and accident of time – myself say, looking for an ancient apartment and a name 42

written on paper in a trembling hand – and, remembering nothing, be strangely halted by the dust and filtered light, the whisper of the well no longer there, and if his heart, transfused, should open like a hand into which someone is suddenly pouring grain, what would that be? return? a poem? a life come back?

43

The River Rare mornings the river is almost palpable, high over us, the strength of its current pulling the clouds, the summer bells, although most other days it’s no more than the shrunken Ljubljanica crawling where the city channels it, algaethickened and sluggish between the stone banks and the seven bridges, creeping up walls, rotting woodwork, halffilling glasses and coffee cups left out while Ljubljana is sleeping. There are rumours of a swan on Trubarjeva and in the cobbled lanes off Mestni Square though whether escaped from a butcher somewhere or fallen into dank reason from the high, marshy spaces above the archbishopric isn’t anything like clear. Who, after all, the 30th of June, 2010, would dare to slaughter a swan (seeing her on the clearest nights gliding there beyond the constellation of the Bear)? Ah, well …  44

The Swan Although there is at least one man who would say that, if just once and only in a dream, he’d witnessed something pale and creature-like between the long and slender thighs of a woman from Wolfova Street, the white swan of Ljubljana – alien and yet night-canny, so grimy he might almost be a black one – is seen, if just until that very thought arrives, only by drowsy street-cleaners and drunken would-be poets waking on city benches at dawn, foraging as at that time he does for bits of olive or capsicum or pizza-crust beneath the outdoor café tables or dragging with his scarlet beak into the first light on Polianska Street one of the heels of bilgesoftened bread the ancient mushroom-sellers leave for him at the murky feet of the east-side pylons of the Dragon Bridge.

45

If there is a god, as some would say there always is within a swan, it is, as these might testify, were they ever to look into his convex eye, one of the small ones, gaunt and terrified, starved of its true habitat, endangered, almost on the verge of extinction.

46

Olives Dull light this afternoon swallowing the ridges, the sound of hunters from the wood below Sveti Peter. The mind wanders. At one point I thought I heard distant thunder and the first drops of rain, but it was Marco pouring olives into the plastic bin, the sound of Marian starting to pick again.

47

Pears It’s the fourth of July in Australia but still the third here, the night hot and the full moon rising over Nova Vas; she is lying back in the deckchair trying to work out her new mobile phone and I’m inspecting the ruins of my backpack, caught in airport machinery at Frankfurt or Helsinki, hardly a problem, now I think about it, given the mess I’ve just flown above, the shelling of innocent civilians, the bombs in the crowded markets, asylum boats foundering in the Indian Ocean, whales dying from explosive harpoons, elephants falling to their knees shot for their tusks, the cattle and the sheep filed to their deaths in the great Satanic Mills of the slaughterhouses, and suddenly Emiliano comes up, with a basket of pears, maybe fifty or sixty of them, all perfect, each one the size of young child’s fist, wanting us just to see them, I guess, how beautiful they are, with the first russet blush of summer on them, and I take one as he leaves, as he wants me to, walk over to the balcony wall 48

and stand there, eating it, stare out at the distant lights of the villages, making no sense of anything, engulfed in mystery.

49

A Month of Seven Funerals I’m sitting in the study long after dinner, still thinking, and at some point Bobbi on his mat beside the desk lets out a strange howl in his dog dream and I wonder if it could possibly be that he knows that this has been a month of seven funerals, and then smile, imagining him looking up and, seeing my long face, wondering if it could possibly be that I sense, somehow, what he is feeling. The night gets deeper, anyway, and at a later point I take him down the inside stairs so that he can sleep the rest of it in his favourite place under the kitchen table then come back up myself, thinking of going to bed, and of my small and scattered handful of friends and of all the sad things that scatter us.

50

Late Music Late music from a party in the village and the voices of children returning home speaking about the new priest, drunk in his own vomit at the bottom of the rectory stair, the yellow moon leering over Grintovec, bats swooping the streetlight, a boar in the valley braying loudly for a mate.

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Apricots Some years it’s the tomatoes red and thick on the trellises, some years it’s the small, sweet grapes hanging over the outside table, some years the golden potatoes thick in the sandy field, some years, dry years, it’s apricots, small and intense weighing down the boughs, drawing the wasps in, filling the air with their yellowness, and always, always it’s olives dozing through the hot summer, waking when the autumn tightens, tumbling from the nets into the open bins: I sometimes think it’s the heart that the crops respond to as much as the drift of seasons, one year’s memories bringing on the next year’s attentions, the year after’s harvest; a memory, say, of his mother’s golden chips on a winter Sunday, or the way his father, just after the war would reach up from the table to pull the black grapes down, and he and his brothers, and the wives and the cousins talked, or the way, on one of his summer leaves from the army, that strange, slender girl, Alenka, dead 52

now these forty-two years, gathered a dozen apricots then sat there, with the pile of them golden in her lap, breaking them in halves and giving them to him, the halves, one by one, between her lips, gripped by the tips of her teeth.

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Witness You’re spared, for something, as witness. Not knowing what will be of help. No thought to who might hear. That vineyard there – the long rectangle of striated green – planted with money from the dictator; that story you heard yesterday about the young poet in Buchenwald who could do nothing after but drink and wander; this bright morning with its melon and peaches warm from the sun; the panic in the young cow’s eye; you cannot not utter you must say, and say.

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Open House

In the Kingdom of Shadows In the back lanes and alleyways a few late humans are scuttling off abandoned by their bicycles but don’t worry, they are diurnal, if we don’t frighten them they will flow eventually over us like slow, tainted light. In the kingdom of shadows, in the march of the middle night, the last embers of the day gone out, the puppets are lost in their stupors of desire. In the kingdom of shadows, world without end, slugs traverse the prairies of the soul, mice enter the pure land, cockroaches conquer the valleys of death. In the kingdom of shadows, dominion of cats and sugar gliders, moths are mastering the constellations, spiders whispering their histories to the stars.

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Spiders About the House Up here it’s funnel-web country, build a house and it draws them around, every basement a Chartres or a Coventry, every low window a trawling-ground: garden with gloves on, take care when you’re under the deck, touch a trip-wire and you summon them, move a log too quickly and one might leap at your neck. They come up through the floorboards to escape the wet, roam widely in springtime looking for a mate, can get aggressive when whatever passes for their blood is up. I don’t like to kill anyone, deadly or not, but I draw a line at my thresholds: any such neighbour that crosses them might be neighbour no more. Perhaps the best that you can say is that funnel-webs keep red-backs away, though very few others: certainly not the wolf spiders who riddle our lawn with their burrows and can be seen out hunting at night, their emerald eyes glinting in torchlight, or the St Andrew’s Cross, with their great wide web outside the back door, my almost favourite, so perfect the X they make of themselves, right at the centre, like men spreadeagled in the middle of their being 58

or ski jumpers at the top of their flight, second only to the mystic orb-spider whose intricate tracery between the wormwood and the lemon tree is such a metaphor for poetry. And yet there are more – the daddy-long-legs, say, supposedly most poisonous of all were he ever able to get fangs through skin or the tiny, tentative swimmer I found in the bathroom sink last winter, who stayed three days or so, savouring the splash of surf, the waves, thirsty beyond measure for something I suspect there is no measuring, or those other two, internal and, I guess, my point in writing this: the one whose web you see only on the MRI, the neat bundles of her victims at C2 or 3 (you never see the spider herself, but feel her, late at night, testing the guy-ropes, patrolling the trip-wires, tugging here and there where something on a nerve needs tightening), and this last one, stranger still, whose web’s his life itself: damaged and torn, repaired a hundred times, obssessive beyond imagining, he’ll lumber out at almost any trouble or excitement in his neighbourhood, wrap it clumsily in a cocoon of words, as if he thought it could be kept, or understood.

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Eight Mile In the house on the ridge at the Eight Mile, on the old veranda, people are talking late into the night, about suffering and memory, history, loss, the comings and the goings of love, the rights of the living and the dead. A three-quarter moon rises and lingers overhead and is slowly covered by cloud; wind picks up and then calms. Unnoticed, a young possum sits a long while in a tree-fork, watching. Someone stands, goes inside, comes back with another bottle. The sky clears. The moon shines down again. Somewhere in the trees below a night bird swoops, catches something, takes it away. Tips of cigarettes glow in the dark. The talk continues.

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A Call from Mandelstam … Osip Mandelstam that is, great Russian poet, died in exile in Siberia, 1938: I’m standing in the kitchen, 1 a.m., doing the last of the washing-up, staring out through the window at first at the night’s great blackness, then at the delicately scalloped underwing of a snow-white moth almost as big as the palm of my hand crawling slowly over the upper pane, the intricate articulation of the legs, the albino redness of the eyes, when I get this sudden urge for poetry, so strong it’s like an addict’s doubling. I don’t drop everything, of course, since everything is nearly done, but rinse the last pot and put it on the rack, drain the water, dry my hands, then glancing back at the window as if the moth might just have a clue for me go in to the bookcase in the living room where we’ve put almost all of the poetry, but whatever it is that is calling me certainly isn’t there. It isn’t Yeats, it isn’t Pound, it isn’t John Clare, isn’t Lorca, isn’t Miłosz, isn’t Strand, isn’t James Baxter, isn’t Merwin, isn’t Bly, shelf 61

after shelf, nearly a thousand books, and nothing seems to be reaching me, nothing responds. I turn to the Australians but it’s the same thing again, not Wright, not Hope, not Adamson, not J.S. Harry – even my beloved Chinese are not helping me tonight, not Tu Fu, not Wang Wei, not Li Po, not Po Chű-I, though in frustration I’m about to take my ancient Penguin Book of Chinese Verse when I remember, without much hope or enthusiasm, the musty set of Modern European Poets at ground-level under the ornaments on the far side of the room, but it’s not Pavese, not Cendrars, not Blok, not Yevtushenko, not Celan, so much horror, so much sadness there, yet the wanting is almost an aching in my belly now; then, just as I’m about to stand, my eye catches the spine of Osip Mandelstam and something draws my hand, almost despite itself. I reflect a little guiltily that I remember almost nothing about him, have never even opened the book, yellow and dog-eared as this copy is, so I take it – what else to do? – and go upstairs, sit on the edge of the bed, pull off my shoes and socks and open it at random, and there it is, page 64, poem one hundred and twenty-seven: ‘For life’, it says, ‘for life and care, I’ll give up everything. A kitchen match could keep me warm.’

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Indian Mynahs For years now the Indian Mynahs, garbagebag-peckers, mowers of young parsley or basil plants, constructors of ‘untidy clusters of dried grass and twigs in the crevices of buildings’, have been taking over the suburb, chasing the sparrows and pigeons out, repelling the bulbuls, driving even the currawongs away. Frequently since mid December I’ve seen a pair of them fossick about in the garden, go off with grass fronds, twigs from the ash tree, bits of dried dandelion with the heads still intact, scraps of string or paper, whisps of hair to build up a nest somewhere then heard them, in the early morning, as I’m making the coffee, perch high up behind the stove on the ledge of the exhaust fan vent to look out for a while at the sun rising over Annandale as unperturbed by the noise within as I am by theirs. They work so cannily. Five days away over Christmas – wild winds, high temperatures, fires all down the eastern seaboard –  63

and we come back through the long gauntlets of flame to an exhaust fan that doesn’t work, choked to a standstill by a large, flat nest made of all the things we’ve watched them gathering and at the side of it, perched neatly atop a sealed-off exit-pipe as if it were a custom-made eggcup, one pale blue egg, the colour of Chinese porcelain – a poem given, clearly enough, but also an object-lesson in the art itself, how you need a ledge or alcove to lodge a poem in, how you build it with whatever comes to hand, stalks of dried dandelion, say, or bird feathers, twigs of memory, fragments of half-forgotten, sky-blue pleasure, and try to weave them together as some birds do into a round, well-crafted thing though as often as not find you have simply piled them one on the other like the Indian Mynahs, leaving the eggs to the reader.

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Looking for Andrei Gromyko Standing in the shower this morning, getting ready to go in to work I thought suddenly of Andrei Gromyko. I can’t say why. All I’d been doing was answering an email about a new professor of Australian Literature and preparing to send a friend’s translation of Catullus to a publisher and while I might have been briefly thinking of Memmius and Gellius and the rise and fall of Caesars, poets fiddling while Rome burns, etc., I was also making a second pot of coffee and wiping up birdshit from the kitchen floor and I can’t quite see what Andrei Gromyko had to do with any of that: this is Australia after all and there have never been any Andrei Gromykos here. Maybe it was a dream I’d had, maybe it is something in the air, but all day it’s obsessed me. I asked my wife if she could explain it and she said ‘Andrei who?’ I asked my class, all twenty-four students, but none of them knew who Gromyko was either. He was not in the Mitchell Library where I went to meet a friend at lunchtime. He was not in the Australian Museum, nor, as far as I could tell, in any of the coffee shops along Broadway or Glebe Point Road and if eventually I thought I saw him 65

in a meeting of the Professorial Board he blurred so quickly it was impossible to tell. I looked in the papers but there was nothing there. I listened to the news and some inane talk-back radio, but while I did learn something about baking and people’s opinions on recycling water from sewage treatment plants there was no sign of Gromyko anywhere, nor later when I walked the dog or went to the wine shop or talked to Tom Petsaninis for half an hour in the middle of Darghan Street, or from my study window watched a drug deal going down in the alley behind the house. The absence of Gromyko is becoming overwhelming: I seem to be not seeing him everywhere. Even the potato-like visage of the Australian Prime Minister on the evening news and the narrow, myopic eyes of the National Treasurer can’t quite explain it, though by this time I’ve thought of Gromyko so often that his bald head and zip-tight lips might almost be said to be drifting before me in the twilight. Later, in bed, the name is still ringing so much within me that, just to get rid of it, I imagine climbing out through the window and shouting it from the bathroom roof, and all the small creatures of the night scuttling off into their dark reaches, the moths and the spiders and the cockroaches, 66

going Andrei Gromyko! Andrei Gromyko! as if carrying to all their towns and villages tidings of some new, distant star. But I don’t, of course, and it isn’t like that. Sometimes I hear screaming. Sometimes I hear wild shouting. Sometimes, late at night, I hear knocking from the house next door, knocking and knocking …

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Andrei Gromyko!

Phasmid They call them Phasmatidae, I think, the genus, though I might well be wrong; the species I simply cannot trace: small stick-like insects so perfectly disguised you’d think them a part of a eucalypt until, the wind or some sudden disturbance of the leaves dislodging them, they fall onto something not their colour. Match-length scrolls of bark, they could be, though looking more closely you think something more delicate, utterly. I’d see one once or twice a year fallen from the great gum tree at the bottom of the Creek Street yard, little vessels of dust, moving through the same, but never, before or since, any one like this, preternatural, primordial, a Titan amongst insects, dinosaur, some twenty-two centimetres long on the concrete floor of the garage; at first I thought a stick, but, going to kick it aside saw her move, just slightly, and realised. When I came back, driving carefully, she was no longer there, though two days later I saw her again clinging to the rubber tyre of a car parked in the lane: there must have been a mighty power in her legs, to hold her there, so horizontally, 68

and of course I feared for her, and should have left a note for the driver before taking off, but didn’t, being in some human rush. The next day the car was gone and the creature also from my mind until, driving in again, a few days later still, and getting out of the car, I saw her lying less than a metre from me, her hind-part just crushed by my driver’s-side wheel. I picked her up, of course, and buried her beneath the tree from which I’ve always thought she came and since then, for eleven years or more, I’ve wondered what could be their name.

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Ninox strenua Ninox strenua, the Powerful Owls, stand sixty centimetres tall and have wingspans of almost one hundred and fifty, ‘defend’ a territory of up to fifteen hundred hectares though hunt much wider. Have beaks tough as boltcutters, mate for life, live on a diet of ringtailed possum and sweet sugar glider, are endangered and rarely seen though their two-note call is familiar to anyone who listens to the bush at night. In our catchment there’s at least one breeding pair, working its way as the months pass anti-clockwise over an area twenty by twenty kilometres – four hundred square. The local wildlife rescue service will not release young possums into the scrub at any time near the full moon and until they’ve checked the raptor’s whereabouts. Ninox strenua are rumoured to kill up to thirty ringtailed possums each per night, and, almost human in their wastefulness, eat only the brain.

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Open House Birds, she murmurs, and goes on writing, then, later, birds again before standing up and going off to bed as if something has at last been said. In the sudden silence afterward there are no birds to be heard, only the deep thrumming of the body like some huge vessel moving slowly towards open water the doors and windows of the house so open now almost anything might enter

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The Barbarians I have known these families upwards of a year now, new neighbours in a rented house, generation after generation, children and parents, grandparents and beyond. Coming in each night from under the skirtings to graze on the dry dogfood, striking out over the white tiles of the kitchen floor looking always for something more, they can seem a kind of sluggish centaur or young, just-antlered elk crossing fresh-fallen snow leaving their silver trails so thickly on the entrance mat you’d think it a magic carpet or homage to the Milky Way. In an earlier house, not long ago, fearing for my precious lettuces I’d have sprinkled salt on them or caught them up in a paper towel and left them outside for the birds, but now, in what must be a joke as much for them as me, I coax them onto leftover salad leaves and take them carefully into the long grass

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at the bottom of our tiny yard, hoping that the birds won’t find them, well aware they’ll make their way back the next night, or the night after that. Tonight there are at least eleven of them gathered about his bowl, chowing down ravenously, as if they’ve come from a long hike somewhere – a wedding, say, in the house next door, or funeral on the far side of the patio. Looking down, from my human height, they seem a world away; ‘we are not compatible’, I’m tempted to say; ‘wherever they go is not where I would go’; ‘we are as different as moon and sun’, then, shocked, stop myself, seeing at last how the barbarians come.

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Freight A hot night, no sign of the promised storm. You argue with your parents long distance – that bloody priest again – and then go out to the deck to watch the quarter moon ride the clouds westward. So much still left unsaid – the bed so full of ghosts we hold each other waiting for sleep to blanket them. At 3 a.m. – your breathing calm and deeper now – something triggers the porch light and I hear the scream of some small creature cut suddenly off: just that, no wing-sound, no scuttering of cat and then, five minutes later, the long slow ache of a freight train, and the starting rain.

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Cold Mountain at it again air thick with rain and midnight shoes soaked from the wet grass flap, flap of its wings as it shifts to the cherry laurel to watch the point of my torchlight

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The Plover There’s a fellow crying in Martin Place. They can’t stop him. – Les A. Murray iv There’s a Spur-winged Plover holding up traffic on Ross Street right in the middle of the southbound lane. Cars and buses, vans and taxis, pick-ups and four-wheel drives all the way back to the Anzac Bridge and more of them coming. There’s a Spur-winged Plover holding up traffic on Ross Street, right in front of an old red Volvo, no-one can budge her. Drivers are getting out of their vehicles, passengers are angling for a better view, diners are sidling out of Tran’s Thainese with spring rolls and napkins in their hands, tattooists and half-finished customers wandering out of Needles-R-Us. What’s the hold-up? An accident? A pedestrian down? Someone dying in the street? But no, it’s only a bird, a Spur-winged Plover, screaming incessantly, refusing to let anyone near her. ‘Run over the bastard!’ calls a large man in a business suit, but then shrinks back into the crowd shamed by the glare of his neighbours; ‘Cut off its head’, cries a young girl, mimicking, 76

then ducks, as if an invisible hand had swiped at her, or the bird were protected by ring of fire. No thought, no daring, no tenderness can enter the plover’s wide circle of fury; any attempt is answered by a wild rush and a wide-beaked, demonic cry. ‘I’ve had enough!’ she seems to be shrieking, ‘and I’m not going to take it anymore! I’m sick of the traffic! I’m sick of the buildings! I’m sick of this city! I’m sick of people!                a I’m sick of pollution!               w I’m sick of everything!’             a – but these are only imaginings: no-one could guess the true secret of the bird’s distress.                      and Later, people will say she was disoriented, lost, or that she was merely defending her nest,     flaps but they will not have seen the frenzy in her eye. Still others will claim they gathered her,        ty calmed her, took her to the Bay, but it isn’t that way.  twen As if, quite suddenly, there was no more to say and no point in shouting at humans anyway,     teen the bird simply stops, composes herself, makes   eigh one last rush at the dumbfounded Volvo, then,  teen avoiding the hands reaching up for her, takes off,  six

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Jennifer’s Mound It was that time again: almost out of meat and seven pigs fattening at an alarming rate. A house meeting and it was decided, Jennifer it would have to be, the oldest and largest, or Two-spot, the next in size, though it had been such a hassle to get the last one down the mountain for the killing we decided we would try to do it here – or get it done, if Steve would come up from Radiance, a gentle giant of a guy when he wasn’t overdoing acid, a butcher’s son, and excellent with a gun since that’s the way I wanted it, quick and painless; as the cook I guess it was my say. And that’s how it was, standing a little back from the middle of the kitchen door, out of sight’s way, taking aim at Jenny at the centre of the yard on the mound of dirt and gravel someone had brought there for something they’d never got around to, well before I came, now all grown over with couch grass and dandelion and dock, which for some reason the pigs had decided they’d rather doze upon than crop.           One rifle shot and a second of shock and she was down, as clean as you could have wished it, dead before she hit the ground. I should have moved the others out 78

if I’d have thought of it, but didn’t. We loaded her onto a cart – much squealing then – and took her round the front, where Steve strung her up on the post-frame over the gate he reckoned must have been used for that purpose before, bled her, and slit her open, gathered her guts in an old washing tub, cleaned her and cut her up, the rest of them eerily silent now, huddled against the far fence on the other side of the house. It’s not that but the next morning I’m writing about: getting up at 5 a.m. to make coffee in the strange quiet and the mist and, looking out, seeing them there, all six, lying on the mound like ghostly sentinels, their grief as pervasive as the mist itself. They kept it up for days and afterward migrated to the far side of the shed. We ate her, as you have to do, out of respect, and then – it was only weeks – I said, knowing it was probably the end of me there, I said That’s it. I’m never cooking meat again.

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Carmen 193 All day the poet writes about the wondrous creatures of the world, the beasts, the fishes and the birds, their gracefulness, their speed, their flight, then, wonder typed and safely filed, wonders which to eat tonight.

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The Roo Field It’s hard to say how they’d stacked up up there, the barbed wire fence only chest-high, and I’m not tall: surely nothing an average grey couldn’t clear given room to gather pace, but I’m not a kangaroo. Probably one or two had come first and judged against it; there was a road after all, and a car or truck every minute or so, and maybe at that time just grass enough, drought as it was, but more had come, and more, tired and hungry, from the hills behind Tharwa, more, and more; by the time it became clear that they had no option but to jump there would have been no room for it and all they could do was stare, all thousand of them, a thousand plus, at the great field of summer grass just opposite, and I could only watch them standing there, without food or water or space to move, packed like sardines, I might once have said, or humans in a soon-to-be-burning nightclub. They were so still. If I’d had a gun I could have tried to startle them but what good would that have done? Even as I’d stood there more had come. Maybe, that night, with the traffic gone 81

the great mob of them somehow dispersed. I’ve always hoped so. And maybe it was all and only a dream like the one I woke from this morning, the men and the women and the children at the barbed wire fence, so gaunt, in their striped uniforms.

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‘We pass a town empty of people’ A landscape that was all saltbush and red sand before is now billabongs and oxbows, riverains. We pass a town empty of people through a storm of fattening galahs, move out past locusts gorged on green stubble, a wedge-tailed eagle feasting on road-kill kangaroo, the desert lush as legend, wild duck circling in their thousands over lakes not seen since early last century, kites, hawks and Nankeen kestrels keeling in the heavy air, sluggish with plenitude.

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Captain Hunter and the Petrels Tuesday the 12th of February and I’ve gone to see Andrew, picked up a few things from the bookshop on the way – two novels since I’m in that mood, a book of paintings of Australian birds and a CD of Gurrumul Yunupingu whose voice haunted me so much a year ago – then gone to the dentist, the second time in two days, and come home numb-jawed to read the news of how an elderly Catholic priest with dementia has been fined for biting the ear off another in a fight over a parking spot. In the bird book there’s a story of how, in 1790, shipwrecked John Hunter, the crew of the Sirius and Norfolk Island’s five hundred inhabitants (mostly prisoners) avoided starvation by eating one hundred and seventy thousand of its nesting petrels. A rescue ship arrived in August, but the petrel – named ‘Providence’ accordingly (from providore) – has never recovered; the only image we have of it was drawn by Captain Hunter himself as his victim was on her way to the cooking pot. The book has also several illustrations of the Mountain Lowry and as I read about the petrels I was thinking of the bird that hit the study window yesterday – how we heard the thunk from the kitchen just as the rain began, and went in to find the smudge-mark on the pane and the ohso-beautiful lowry lying on the grass below – a 84

‘heart break’, as Teja might have said – so still I could not imagine that he wasn’t dead, but she saw movement and ran down and came back holding him closely to her chest and within two minutes he had woken and suddenly flown, leaving only, on the lawn, a single green-blue feather, such as John Hunter might have drawn. A poem is a place where you can bring things together, you don’t have to know why. The mad and the bad, the gentle and the dead, tooth-ache and heart-ache and the ache and quandary of history. We are all creatures trembling under the sun of witness (or is it rain?); some of us, for reasons it would be hard to explain, trying to catch the strange, sad music of it, on the days we can hear it, before it disappears again. .

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Majesty Resplendent in dust and late sunlight an old sow, tall and walkingstick-slender from the rear, moustachioed, great moon-fish shaped from the side, her long, sparse hairs and leathern hide goldbrown in the Jaipur dusk, her withered dugs almost touching the ground, has come up from the river flats to trawl the earthen gutters for scraps from the street-stalls  –  broken melons, coconuts, pieces of naan, slops of chana or saag paneer – while the traffic of trucks and camels, rickshaws and rattling taxis thins and the last, soft coronas of light settle radiant upon her oblivious and many-nippled godliness: Goddess Sow, God Melon, Goddess Coconut, God Light, Goddess Dusk, Goddess

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Street, Goddess Dug, Goddess Camel, God Naan And there, as always, outside Pandit’s Bicycle Rent and Repair Shop, drinking warm, strong, Mandhar’s Evaporated Milky tea, God Order-of-things, yarning endlessly with God Nothing-to-be-done

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How to Ride a Horse Once the hair was removed, the tanners would bate the material by pounding dung into the skin, or soaking the skin in a solution of animal brains. – Wikipedia, entry on ‘Tanning’ To ride a live horse, it must be said, you must first have a dead one, which you have had flayed to remove the skin or hide, and which then –  with the aid of an essence of oak-tree or a sequence, less expensively, of urine, faeces and animals brains –  you’ve had cured or tanned before, dried and beaten to soften it, you’ve had it cut into various lengths and shapes for the saddle, the reins, the straps, and the hat, belt and boots that a rider wears (their wallet, their whip, their watchband, their crop), the rest of the carcase having long been consigned to the makers of dog-food and glue. As for the second, the living horse, it must be broken, unless of course it has been bred in captivity, when it may be deemed to have been broken from the start. Saddled, with the bit and the reins in place, it can then be mounted and (the dead horse on the living’s back) gently 88

goaded by the rider’s ankles, its mouth pulled firmly to the left or right, made to follow any track a rider might. Stroked, occasionally, and brushed, stalled, watered, given hay – loved, as riders are wont to say – until such time as it becomes a dead horse (etc.), it should be of service indefinitely. (You may, in the above, care, where appropriate, to substitute ‘dead cow’ for ‘dead horse’.) Now to talk about fences …

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At the Lytton Hotel, barely able to hear myself think for the day-long shouting and jackhammers of the sewer-work outside the window and the sound of the five trapped pups in the service yard opposite yelping and whining all night and their mother incessantly barking, the valets in their workroom down the corridor with their Bollywood blaring from six a.m. and the beggars and taxi spruikers the constant honking of the cars telling that man inside me Be calm be calm and the sound of the five trapped pups yelping and whining, the poor bitch coming back at two and three and four a.m. unable to get to them with her dark swollen nipples in the pool of dusty light under the streetlamp hanging so low and heavy beneath her, so 90

low and full, so aching, so broken, I

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Plenitude for Johanna Featherstone

It is the 4th of April, 2008, and I am thinking of pigeons partly because Johanna has asked me, and partly because I have just seen three topknot pigeons on separate telephone wires at a cross-street by the highway in Lawson, NSW, and thought, of course, of Ezra Pound seeing the swallows on the wires of the DTCv and (he not I) thinking of Janequinvi – how limited that stave must have been, with half the halfnotes limitless sky (what sound does a swallow make in flight, what F, what A?) although all I can think of for now is how I ate a pigeon once, at Gay Bilson’s Oso-expensive restaurant at Berowra, the cool and grey-pink tenderness of the breast of it, so almost uncooked – so 92

rare – that I very nearly complained and would certainly not have finished it were it not for the price I was paying, and my own reputation (though with no-one but myself) for eating almost everything –  snake, alligator, snail, goat, Li-river catfish, sea-squirt, roo –  as if, as I thought then, that were something to be proud of and not yet another of my Seventy-Seven Stupidities. Why pigeons? I wonder, and then Why not? if the tiny and not the immense shall lead us (that is Webbvii) out of the wilderness of our human thought, then there can be no stopping-point (follow a cockroach, say into the labyrinth of desire …) The great ornithologist, John James Audubonviii, recorded having seen, in the autumn of 1813, a passage of migrating Passenger Pigeons lasting three days, so many sometimes they filled the sky and almost 93

blotted out the sun. In a similar index of plenitude, W. G. Sebald, in the third chapter of The Rings of Saturn reproduces a photograph of men standing up to their knees in a tide of fresh-caught herring (I remember that, in my small way – the mullet-run in Huskisson …).ix Passenger, from passager, to pass (they carried nothing): rosepink (the male), greycrested, long tapered tail … glasseyed, faded by sun from the window, layered with dust in the decommissioned display, Case Western Reserve University, 1968 the last Passenger Pigeon, named Martha, died ‘alone’ at the Cincinnati Zoo at around 1 p.m. on September 1st, 1914, and the 94

herring industry is gone. I think of them because just lately the Commonwealth Government of Australia condoned the killing of four hundred kangaroos in the heart of the National Capital – not many, as far as roo slaughter goes but I take it as signx – and now there is talk of a ‘cull’ of koalas on Kangaroo Island, another of corellas in Gippsland, possums in north-western Victoria, and just today (4th April, as I say) I read that the last Tasmanian Devil in the wild will very likely die before face-cancer-free replacements are ready to be released from the laboratory the last Tasmanian Tiger ‘in captivity’ died at the Hobart Zoo on September 7th, 1936; the last Tasmanian Aboriginal … ah, but we are not to draw such comparisons … I try to work out the essential difference between humanity and the flesh95

eating Ebola virus but can’t come up with much, the huge ulcers of our cities creeping over the earth, the vast plantations to serve our needs devouring everything in their path, but to return to pigeons, though fearing that any attention drawn to them is like directing the sight of a gun, I’d like to salute Bohumil Hrabal, author of Closely Watched Trainsxi, who is said to have died while trying to feed pigeons through a fifth-floor window of a Czechoslovakian psychiatric hospital: privately, I think it was a bold and arguably successful attempt at flight

96

The Gate What are they after, those huge dogs we see sometimes at the street gate or through one of the boundary fences, emerging from the dusk, the scrub, suddenly there, then gone before you can call anyone or tell for certain what breed they are, Bullmastiff, you’d think, though crossed with Doberman or Arab or Great Dane? Someone’s pig-hunting dogs maybe, let loose or just got free, roaming with impunity, and we worry for the sheep, the ducks, the rabbits, our own farm dog or any other creature sheltering here, waking at night to listen for anything unusual, hair raised at any sound of a squall, checking each morning to make sure all are there. You see them once or twice in a week sometimes, then maybe just once in a month or so, but it can be much longer, and you forget about telling the Council, raising the fences, asking the vet for what she might know of them, then look up and suddenly they are there again, tight browed, thick jowled, black eyed, the dark forest behind them, staring from the gate.

97

Wild Ducks A splashlanding in the pond, another then another, another, the ducks back after three days who knows where – flighttraining most likely, the two ducklings just ten days ago working like the Wright brothers on a stretch of open ground by the water-tank: such strange disquiet we had when they first flew off having watched them almost from the nest, three of them at first, struggling through the lawn, one gone within a day from the cold, I imagine, of too-early spring, the others slowly growing, thickening, there from earliest morning pecking through the wet grass, day in and out, learning at last to swim, the parents always shepherding, the drake elegant, aloof, alert, the mother aggressively protective, running at you open-beaked if you came too close, one day so surprising me that I tripped, crashed to the path, bore the bruises and pulled muscle for a month. I don’t know where they nest – thought the old chook-pen at first, then beneath the cabin deck, the thick rhododendron by the pond, but no, though we heard one night a caterwauling from somewhere there; I guess she dealt with that intruder too. I don’t know why I write this, it’s 98

all human and I can’t get out of this place, into the purportedly true, yet here we are a sort of protectors to them, nothing more and not well even that, marvelling at the way they stretch their slim necks forward with each stride as if there were something just there, beyond, to be knocked upon.

99

Report from Blue Mountains

Another Page from the Book of Everything with the error so entrenched that we’ll never root it out with all the human evils and the good that tracks them like gulls following a ship at sea with all the seas and the swelling oceans, the creeks and the pools and the rivers that run down to them the Seine and the Parramatta, the Arno, the Mara with its swift dark current and its wooden mills, the Sava with its freight of bodies just shot or throats cut at the waterside with the company of poets whispering their secret graft like old men showing each other their gemstones on the Ponte Vecchio with the Ponte Vecchio, the Pont Neuf, the Rialto, the Harbour Bridge and the sludge that gropes under them, taking Florence and Paris and Sydney to their separate inseparate seas with the intolerable and hideous weight of them and their paradoxical lightness, the girders and the steeples with their infinite mysteries, their intricate filigrees of rust with the human Gargantuas eating their way through all of the flocks of the earth, each day in each person seventeen kinds of death with the beasts themselves caged or in pasture or transport trucks, with their soft muzzles, their large innocent eyes, the pale whisps of their breath in the dawn fields 103

or by gas station lights at midnight with the vast manscapes and the roads that lead to them severing and dividing the indivisible (O fields of illusion!) with the wombat-holes by the highway at Lake George and the pomegranates overhanging the old road to Tressan, we humans stumbling about so dangerous in our guilt and loneliness with the cockatoos circling and the water flowing into the dam, my neighbour Franklin coming out with his big tin of birdseed, pouring it into the white plastic bowl, another lightness with its myriad strange messages, another day with its hands wide open another page from the book of everything

104

Beauty and the Beast It’s Beauty and the Beast with us, no question, she the Beauty and the other there in the mirror each morning inching towards me relentlessly, a pock-marked, rough-skinned, frowning thing ruddy with alcohol and thinking asking and giving no quarter, staring at me with eyes that know far too much and to which there is never an answer. Why she has stayed with me so faithfully there is no knowing – some aberration of her own perhaps or predilection for ancient wood or stone: birds choose their homes, why not she? Starling in an ancient belfry, snowy barn owl in a hole high in a lightning-struck tree, the home she makes in me warms me indescribably, a secret treasure I’ll not relinquish while ever the living’s in me, use every ounce of beastness to protect.

105

Mist I.M. Pat Skinner

It was a Sunday afternoon and we had taken the dog for a walk in the park by the swimming pool –  the large park with the small brown lake trimmed with old pines and bordered by the rainforest gully with the sound of the creek running through it –  and had gone over to the open space and thrown the ball for him and talked to the lady with the three kelpies and she had told us about the copperhead they had seen through the summer and shown us where he lived under the thick scrub willow and we had made our way to the other side of the lake and I had looked back towards her, and seen that mist had already covered the ridge, and for a few moments, having wondered where the ducks were and listened to the wild screeching of the cockatoos high over the forest of stringybarks, I turned to watch the dog exploring the bushes by the swimming-pool fence and when I turned back – it was no more than ninety seconds – the mist had rolled in and most of the lake and all of the opposite bank had disappeared, the opposite bank, and the trees, and the woman with her dogs, 106

as if a cloud had descended as I suppose it had, and as I was watching this – the brown, glassy lake disappearing under the mist, and the mist thickening – and noting the sudden quiet, no sound of water, no dog-bark, no sound of cockatoos, the ducks came back, two of them, landing on the lake, with long, rippling Vs trailing behind them where just a moment before had been nothing, and floating towards me, then curving gently away, just that: no solution to anything, no end to the war, no end to stupidity, no answer to death and dying, no consolation the ducks came back, that’s all, and floated across the lake, and turned gently away no message for me or anyone I knew.

107

If Anyone Asks for Me My home is in the mountains now, I am becoming reclusive after all this time, living with my young wife the painter, enjoying cooking, drinking wine, letting it settle the dust of too much busyness, keeping the barking of the world at bay. If anyone asks for me, let someone say ‘He is lost among clouds’.

108

The Man in the Lift As if he were a dog reading the wind, and although you are wearing no perfume, only the oh-so-subtle scent of yourself, the elderly man in the lift, just before the door closes behind you (perhaps it does not seem to him that we are together, you leaving at the third-floor lobby, I going on up to the seventh), lifts his head slightly, closes his eyes, dilates his nostrils in a long, slow breath.

109

Broad Bean Meditation This afternoon, at the kitchen counter, ‘liberating’ just-cooked broad beans from their skins, I found myself thinking of the children that I never had, and beyond them, through the mind’s deep shadows, all the generations of the lost – aborted, miscarried, dead in the egg or womb or during the hard passage out of them. It’s their shape, I guess, pale Forms in the fingers, foetal, homuncular, each broad bean in its caul: one might be holding a dead star. Pythagoras, the ancient Greek philosopher, would not let his followers consume them, maybe because, as Pliny said, the souls of the dead still dwell in them, maybe instead because the dark cleft at the nether end reminded him too much of women. Dog children, cat children, human, bird: the broad bean, as I saw today, even has umbilicals, as if to signify that everything is loss, is child. Can there be mind without suffering? Can there be living without damage? I just don’t know. A famous Australian poet once wrote a ‘Broad Bean Sermon’. I 110

re-read it almost an hour ago, looking for something that I can’t quite name, but no, all is abundance there, and populace. Tonight I’ve prepared them, lightly charred, with salt and lemon juice, olive oil, cayenne pepper, parsley and mint from under the laurel tree, and eat them slowly, thinking. Rich, succulent, piquant, they taste of waiting.

111

Report from Blue Mountains 1. My Echium, exotic that it is, has collapsed under the weight of its own blossoming. This afternoon, while I tried to string it, the sun slipped behind a bank of cloud and the first fat drops of a heavy shower fell. As I climbed the steps to the back veranda, the dog following, I saw a tiny beetle on the handrail hesitate and turn, as if deciding to make for home. The rain, as I sat in the doorway, thundered on the roof, like wonder, halting us all.

2. It is spring in the mountains, uncertain spring. One day it hails and the temperature drops, the next it is windy and thirty degrees. Plants bolt upward and then stop, as if thinking they have come too far. The grass is thick and wild, full of dandelions, scotch thistle, rogue poppies, dock. This morning I found myself longing for a country where no-one understands me. Tonight a large moth has been keeping me company, dusting my shoulders with her yellow wings.

112

Lamplight Lux, my fair falcon, where are you now? Tossed in some black gale again? Buffetted by heart, by snow? My nights’ harrier harried, time-hurt and hiding, her bronze tuft whitened, her slender spine made bow? Or are you still riding the high air somewhere, your eye your mind’s arrow, scouring the fields below? Ah, my love, my golden, I don’t need to be told. You won’t come to my wrist again; this arm cannot hold.

113

‘Windmill’ 1. What we call a ‘windmill’ is in fact a winddriven water-pump, and what the Dutch might call such (if the Dutch were speaking English) is a wind-driven engine for the milling of grain into flour.

2. A true ‘windmill’ if you could find one would grind the wind, but into what flour, for what bread?

3. The rusty blades of an old winddriven water114

pump as they turn in the night breeze mill air into sound and, further down, sadness, memory, the little loaves of regret.

115

The Motherboard Adrian, my next-door neighbour, has asked me for a poem and it seems the least that I can do, so let this be its own explanation – how my mother died just on forty-two years ago, on May 24th, and over and again, though not every year, has come back to wreak a kind of havoc on that or the days around it as if there were some unfinished business she has with me or wants me to finish with the world, this year amongst the worst, starting with a meeting missed and moving on through a crashed computer, a broken-down lawnmower, our car dying at 9 p.m. on Lapstone Hill and finishing as I tried to get to sleep at last with a wind so wild that, as I’d find on waking, it tore down the rotten and ivy-covered pine at the bottom of the yard smashing a hole in our common fence wide enough for a truck to drive through.

116

It’s the motherboard, the technician tells me, and as I mull that over, Saturday May 26th, after a long sleep-in, making coffee and looking out over the valley, the lawnmower back, the computer and the car to come and most of the tree cut up and gone, congratulating myself for coming through, I hear a tapping I can’t identify and, listening more closely, moving to the right, craning for a view around the fern tree, down there in the grey morning light, unbidden, emerged from his own wild weather, settling an old score with the world perhaps and absorbed in the rhythm of its doing, see Adrian from next door, with a long piece of two-by-four, mending our fence.

117

Midsummer Midsummer and a south-east wind bringing autumn cold, twelve days of rain rotting the tomato plants, battering the lettuces, washing the seedlings away. What else to do but read poetry, sleep winter-like sleep, drink water straight from the sky?

118

Money Like Water Money falls about us like rain. It trickles along the gutters, slickens the stairs and the balcony, flows into the downpipe drain, slips through our fingers, gathers in pools the colour of sky. Piped into our houses we flush with money, we wash with money, we clean our cars with money, we feed money to our children, we ripen our fields with money. People go to the desert to flee money or form communes to keep it at bay, but the air is thick with money, the trees drip with money, dig far enough into the soil and the money will be there. It leaks through our pockets, drains from our wallets, seeps from the things we’ve bought. Its subtle acidity riddles our conversation, eats holes in our thought.

119

Stored injudiciously money will evaporate. Stored too tightly it will release malignant vapours when exposed to light. Accept money and you may never be at peace. Refuse, and you may die from the want of it. Old money and new money alike can penetrate the soul. Floorboards are rotted by money. Foundations are undermined by money. A house built on money will never keep the ghosts away. The rising tides of money are making our streets impassable. The melting glaciers of money are deepening the sea. The empty containers of our money clog every waterway. Venice is drowning in money. Vanuatu is drowning in money. They say that the human body is ninety-three per cent money. They say that we will choke on our own money. They say there is no other way.

120

At Refuge for Lynda S.

The day’s heat, unrelenting, trips the catch of evening, revealing the rodents’ empire, the roving firmaments of moths. The great factory of the spiders hums in stillness. The black pond glazes with starlight. How not to be longing? How not to write of the heart?

121

Morning, Station Street Awake at seven after not enough sleep, try again until eight-thirty, then up, shave, shower, dress, turn on the computer, greet and feed the dog, check emails – twelve already – discard five, answer four, set three aside (one disappointment, two to be thought about) then go out to speak with Paul who’s arrived to work on the roof; climb up with him, discuss the job, come back down to call the telephone company, spend ten minutes on hold, leave a message, call the bank to arrange a funds transfer; make coffee, clean up last night’s dishes, stare out at the day awhile, thinking: the sky a cloudless blue for once, light a lush margarine yellow, four sleek white cockatoos on the new fence preening themselves, crests erect, waiting their turn at the seed-bowl, the call of a koel somewhere, and a whipbird, the yard full of blossoming clover, the coffee when I get to it strong, dark, intense.

122

Silent Night Christmas Eve, and the dogs are exchanging season’s greetings over the backblocks, the smell of a barbeque over the fence filling the air with sacrifice, the ritual about to commence, the festival of gluttony and slaughter, cooks stuffing their turkeys, children clustering about the Christmas tree like ants at sugar water. All day the lists and anxiety, the rudeness at the checkouts, the anger in the parking lots, the loneliness in the shuttered houses, the ragged nativities on the lawns, police busy and the highways choked, suicides preparing their Stilnox, paramedics checking their stocks of oxygen, adrenalin, morphine. Christmas Eve, and the long-distance phone calls, the Bloody Marys, the Glűhwein, the priests and the ministers sharpening their prayers, hosts scraping and salting their grill-plates, checking their bar fridge, their prawns on ice, the Queen delivering her annual message, pleading for peace and family, regretting that her husband, in hospital for a stent, won’t be presiding over this year’s hunt. 123

Christmas Eve, and all through the house the tension, the expectation, the wonder. Soon the children will be fed. Soon they will be put to bed. Soon the carols will begin for a world redeemed of sin: Silent night, crystal night … Soon the tables will be set. Soon the ovens will be lit. ‘Unto us a child is born, unto us a Son is given’, and from the squalor of the feedlots, the horror of the holding yards, the abject terror of the abattoirs, under mute, indifferent stars, unthought, unvoiced, ungiven, the cows, the sheep, the geese look on.

124

White Cockatoos Goldcrested Sultans of the Real, white cockatoos winch the day into us, crank it away. * White cockatoos litter the grass like laundry or so some poet said. * At the edge of the oval at twilight, undoing the Council’s new-made lawn, the white cockatoos are like lilies on a wide dark pond. *

125

White cockatoos confound us; they are animal, they know no matter how closely we watch them our mind cannot see. * Could white cockatoos know that theirs is the colour of death? A white cockatoo crossing the sky at dusk out-mourns the crow. * Wings clipped, under duress, a white cockatoo will mimic the language of his oppressors. In the language of the cockatoo there are one hundred words for air. *

126

A white cockatoo flying low at midday signals rain. Swooping into the forest canopy, weaving through the laneways of the pines, pulling seeds through the ankles of the grass, they stitch us to the sky. * White cockatoos are raucous, larrikin, no better word for a group of them but gang. Feed them and they will flock to you. Forget and morning by morning they will dismantle your house. * The memory of white cockatoos effaces us all. They know the highways of the air. Day after day they lesson us. We fail and fail. *

127

Creak of boughs in the frozen forest. What is heavier, the weight of a snowfall or a hundred white cockatoos? * Arrayed on the telephone wires, eyes closed, motionless at sunset, white cockatoos are sleek as white cockatoos. * The sound of a flock of white cockatoos rising about one without shrieking is like a whisper from the second sky. *

128

   Crown       Sultan  white      seed branch     air        swoop    without     sky       flight lane       gang larrikin          crest      let      go * On the golf course, by the water-trap, one coal-black currawong, sulphureyed, and fifty blackeyed white cockatoos.

129

rush

Cock-crow The mind doesn’t always go to it but the place is there; the past, memory, regret: they say it gets sharper every year. Lying awake at 4 a.m., trying to find its metres and its rhymes, I hear the cocks crow a hundred times.

130

Black Dog A whole day goes by. Where does it go? And what is time anyway? Clouds breaking up as they move westward, sun warm on the back, that black dog from the feed store on Camp Street coming at last to my hand.

131

Night Waking Rain all night, hard rain, clearing the gutters, filling the tanks, making a lake from the gully below. Waking at 3 a.m. I could hear the wind buffeting the house, soughing in the maple and fir, the blown water lashing the windows, clattering on the iron roof, bringing the ocean over the Penrith plain, and gale-borne cock-crows, dog-barks thrown in and snatched away. After twenty minutes, up for a pee, my own dog stretching, coming to lick at my hand, my knee, I returned to bed, felt for your feet in the blankets, warm and dry, lay in the grey dawn, thinking.

132

Who I Am Who I am no longer seems to matter the way it once did I am my father’s son but my father is dead I am my mother’s only born but my mother is gone I am my own child’s father and my child’s mother no longer speaks to me I am a friend of my friends but they have their own lives to attend I am my new wife’s husband She is like daylight

133

Reading to the Sheep

Ark Here at dusk the white cockatoos swoop in to land on the grass, the saw-horse, the unfinished fences. Ark! Ark! Ark! they cry as if they know something we might not know.

137

Hidden Valley At the top of the slope, by the water tank, the two sheep are gazing into the invisible while three wild wood ducks sit huddled motionless by the pond and a fourth swims. The day began hours ago. Where have I been?

138

Accomplishment There is Accomplishment in washing-up and cleaning the kitchen, Art in stacking the dishes, Technique and Experience in the prior rinsing, getting the sequence right so that the water stays hot and clear as long as possible, Order and Good Governance in putting away the bottles and jars, recycling the scraps from breakfast or last night’s meal, and something else in doing it all so quietly that one does not disturb the person still sleeping in the next room or the other spirits of the house, thinking as they are this morning so attently or the butcher bird watching from the balcony-rail, stilling the soul to this Meniality, finding the Joy in it.

139

Ram in the Rain Such silence there was before the rain and then it came and clattered on the fibreglass the ram went to shelter under the deck a cockroach came out to savour the ozone the branches that had been hanging low in the heat stirred and I sat and stared into the darkness where it seemed an absence waited but then it stopped and the ram came out and I rubbed deep into his wool hard against his ribs and spine and he leant his weight heavily against mine and I breathed almost easily again knowing that there is no going.

140

Mort Street For fifty years wherever I’ve been I’ve felt I’ve camped out in my life; even this house, on this land I love so dearly, bought from a bankrupt council clerk, shored against fire, against wind, is like a tent on rolling ground. From dawn until midnight, year’s start to end we are travellers whether we take to the road or not, the hours of the day like stations on a line we’ll never find our way back to – this damp I’ve watched rising almost a decade now, that half-read book I leant on the shelf there when was it? October? last year?

141

Reading to the Sheep It is a cold afternoon in early winter and my wife is reading to the sheep the first departmental seminar paper from her doctoral thesis while unbeknownst to her I watch through the kitchen window. She is wearing her heavy winter jacket, and the sheep in their thickening coats are chewing on the already-stripped stalks of the rampant mint and what is left of the autumn grass around the potato bed. The thesis is on the grief of animals and she is reading about the mourning of chickens for their mates, about the grief of calves for their mothers, mothers for their stolen calves, about huge elephants in the Kenyan dusk turning over and over the bones of their dead, she is reading about birds placing branches over the bodies of their companions, and about how, knowing that they did not know, the Lord of some people or another – maybe it was ours –  sent crows to teach them due reverence and rites for the departed,xii she is reading about ants, carrying away so carefully the bodies of their fellows, she is reading about dogs starving themselves after the loss of their loved ones, about dolphins holding, at the surface of the water, their dying friends, about macaque mothers carrying their infants for months after the last breath has left them. 142

Now and again, when she pauses, lost in the incipience of her own sorrow, perhaps, or just asking for breath, one or another of the two sheep comes to her in the sad May twilight and with the top of his head, where the horns have not so long ago been sawn away, nudges her hand as if to comfort her, or perhaps only to ask her to turn a page. The light thickens, and a wind picks up. Ducks settle about her, and the sheep rest at her feet. Night turns into day, then night, then day again. Rain comes and goes. The seminar passes. Spring turns into early summer, drifts on towards autumn. The sheep rise, stretch, graze, return, leaves pile around them and are blown away by the winds of another winter. Your hair turns grey – look at it! – and a million lines come to the backs of your hands. You find this poem. She is still reading.

143

Mountain Night Mountain night, mist among dark trunks cutting visible distances mind going out into emptiness feeling along ghost ridges seeking the long plain breathing as the body breathes, in deeply, out again

144

Orpheus Orpheus Pumpkin, twoweek-old lamb, is singing through the house perhaps in search of his dead mother whom he seems to think speaks to him through the heating-vent. His 2 a.m. bleatings wander through our dreams; his broad, horizontal ears and wide astonished eyes ambush the dawn. Where he came from no one knows, some chink in the heart perhaps, or secret spring of night, or door left open at the edge of thought, his tiny hooves a whisper in the evening grass, his budding horns barnacles in a rockpool still turbulent with winter.

145

Birthday Poem Wounds salved, heart straightened, I take the years since I met you as time given, a decade I’d not have had otherwise. If I’ve regrets whose life is without them? If I have debts let the creditors come. The rain this morning was like the first rain, the sun in your eyes the first sun.

146

Humans at the Gate Humans at the gate, rotund and briefcased, pamphlets in hand, wanting to tell us about Christ our Saviour. No point in asking if they eat meat: lamb sandwiches in the car, milky tea in the thermos yoghurt for the acidophilus.

147

The Ornamental Cherry I don’t know if it is just that sheep like eating the drying leaves of the normally-out-of-reach ornamental cherry, for something in their brightorange fire perhaps, or if instead it is the game they love, or the simple fact that it is she who is feeding them as one might give manna back to the angels, but every evening for almost a week now they have gathered there, in the autumn twilight, waiting for my wife to come with her soft, loving voice and her strong arms, to stand there with them as the light goes and reach up into the golden boughs.

148

Driving Home Sky over the mountains full of cloud caverns, huge banks of darkness massing to the west; by the gas station on Albion Street the traffic lights glowing like emeralds; the dry bones of the trees as I open the gate stirring at the forest edge, the cold chain knocking against hardwood, nothing itself tonight, mind shut out of mind, the last quarter of the waning moon adrift over deepening flood.

149

Afterthought You turn around, go back upstairs, but the room is almost empty, someone is packing up the chairs. ‘Forgotten something?’, they ask, and you say, ‘No’; ‘Good night’, they say, and you say it too.

150

The Lambs There’s a telling congruence, it seems to me, between certain tales from the Bible concerning members of the species Ovis aries (sheep), to wit lambs, rams, wethers, ewes – that gruesome occasion, for example, when God instructed Abraham to slaughter his son Isaac, as sacrifice and proof of submission to the Divine Will, an order which Abraham proceeded reluctantly to fulfil, to be saved at the last moment when God, seeing his willingness, proposed that he might substitute a ram; or that second story, stranger still, though to Christians paramount, unaware as it seems to me they’d have to be of its curious anomaly, of God’s preparedness to sacrifice his own son, for the good, as it is said, of all mankind – that son who, underlining that sense of sacrifice, is so often referred to as the Lamb of God, the aforementioned anomaly within which being that, if God Himself is conducting a sacrifice, it must, unless a supreme and eloquently troubling act of vainglorious tautology, have been to a further being whom He wished to placate – that is, an unconscious and unintentional admission on the part of the fabricators of such tales of the nescience we invented God to deal with in the first place. That, anyway, is how I deal with the third and to me most troubling tale – that of the Passover, and the awkward situation in which 151

God’s Chosen People there find themselves, of having to slaughter a lamb so that they might mark their doors with blood, failure to do so meaning that He would slaughter their first-born. How to explain this? That in effect God says, If you do not slaughter a lamb then I will slaughter your eldest child – a correlate, as I have said, of tales 1 and 2, not to mention a rather thuggish thing to do, and a reminder, too, that ‘sacrifice’ means to make sacred: it’s all to do with lambs, rams, ewes and wethers, it seems to me, not God, a way to justify a choice of food we know to be cruel beyond measure but for which we nevertheless continue to hanker, though not just that but – back to the tales – the curious way in which, read carefully, we find them to admit it all: the powerlessness of God, that darkness within and about us, that horror by means of which we have chosen to survive, that slaughter which we try to pretend someone else is telling us to do; their subtle displacements of their own assertions, so that (they seem to whisper, to confess) lamb and ram, wether and ewe are made sacred, no whit less precious or horrid to kill than our own children.

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Autumn Twilight My old friend is gone and there will be no more wine drunk together under summer moons and talk of the great poems or the mastery of rhythm or the elusive mysteries of being. I am getting older myself and should start to get used to such precipitate departures. But for now I’ll take another glass alone into the Autumn twilight and go over again some of the hard-won secrets before the night comes and the south wind blows them away.

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Mushroom Season A warm March day and I am drowsy whether from age or some other cause I just can’t tell. In the field outside the window there is a sudden carpet of tiny yellow flowers, the last thing you’d expect given how low the sheep have eaten the fodder down – but then just yesterday, after the third day’s rain, the lawn out front was scattered with small orange-topped mushrooms and I remembered someone saying that funghi can be vast organisms, trees underground, and what we see are only the blooms. Just so, on tiny spindle-stalks, and on the old stump by the zucchini garden a bouquet of scalloped wood-fungus, creamyellow, edged with brown, breathtakingly beautiful in the fading light. I could have let this all pass and written nothing, but no, life is a mushroom season; we can never know what will be of significance to those who come after us: a flight of birds, a pattern of weather, a spray of yellow flowers in the short-cropped grass. 154

Each Other’s Tongue Coming out before bed to watch the moonlight from the deck I hear a pump still working and going down to turn it off suddenly can see the moon properly its rays reaching from horizon to horizon playing on a receding edge of cloud and on the winter grass and on the backs of the sheep who to my surprise are still up, watching One comes over and I scratch his neck deep under the thickening wool, bending over to catch his hot breath on my cheek and together we murmur about moonlight, for one brief moment understanding each other’s tongue

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Notes i Hans Zinsser, Rats, Lice and History, 1935. ii ‘Les Chercheuses de Poux’ (‘The Lice Pickers’). iii The Boria is a northerly wind, straight from the Alps. In Slovenian, Burje; often referred to elsewhere as the Bora. iv ‘An Absolutely Ordinary Rainbow’. v As Pound relates at the end of Canto LXXXII: ‘three solemn half notes / their white downy chests black-rimmed / on the middle wire’. The ‘DTC’ is the American Detention Training Centre in which Pound was held – initially in a wire cage – in 1945, awaiting extradition to the United States to face charges of treason. vi As Canto LXXV, Pound reproduces a 1935 arrangement by Gerhart Münch (1907–1988) of Le Chant des Oiseaux by Clement Janequin (c.1483–1558). vii Francis Webb, ‘Five Days Old’. viii See his Birds of America, 2nd ed, London, 1827–38. An online version is available at http://www.audubon.org/bird/BoA/BOA_ index.html ix For an interesting poetic treatment of the same phenomenon, see Robert Adamson’s ‘The Mullet Run’, Cross the Border, Sydney, 1977. x They slaughtered another 6000 a year later, at Majura, a few kilometres away, and have done so annually since. The official ‘harvest’ of kangaroos Australia-wide for 2009 was 3,985,531. xi Bohumil Hrabal (1914–1997). His Ostře sledované vlaky (1965) was first published in English as Close Watch on the Trains, London, Cape Editions, 1968. In 1971 it was made into the film Closely Watched Trains by Jiří Menzel. xii ‘Then Allah sent a crow digging up the earth so that he might show him how he should cover the dead body of his brother.’ – the Koran.

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Acknowledgments Poems from this collection have appeared in: Arc (Canada): ‘Ram in the Rain’ Australian Broadcasting Commission: ‘Silent Night’ Australian Love Poems 2013: ‘No Poem for Weeks Now’, ‘Her Feet’ Best Australian Poems 2009: ‘A Place on Earth’, ‘Ninox strenua’ Best Australian Poems 2010: ‘Rats, Lice and History’ Best Australian Poems 2012: ‘Broad Bean Meditation’ Best Australian Poems 2013: ‘Dust’ Best Australian Poems 2014: ‘Silent Night’ Island: ‘Who I Am’ Meanjin: ‘A Place on Earth’, ‘Tinnitus’, ‘Spiders About the House’, ‘Looking for Andrei Gromyko’, ‘In the Kingdom of Shadows’, ‘Report from Blue Mountains’, ‘“Windmill”’ , ‘Apricots’, ‘Another Page from the Book of Everything’ Melaleuca: ‘Carmen 193’ Prosopopoeia (India): ‘The Thick of It’, ‘Majesty’ Regime #5 (anthology): ‘Mort Street’, ‘Driving Home’, ‘Mountain Night’ Southerly: ‘Mist’, ‘Silent Night’ TEXT: ‘Plenitude’ The Canberra Times: ‘Freight’ The Dublin Review (Ireland): ‘The River’ The Warwick Review (UK): ‘Broad Bean Meditation’ Wet Ink: ‘Poem’

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